Embodied living through presence & pleasure

Take time to digest the year

I’m writing you from bed, where I’ve just spent the past hour looking through my 2017 planner. (Yes, I love an old school paper planner!)

I wanted to go back, month by month, and remember and savor and celebrate the experiences of this year. In a word, DIGESTION. It is so easy to forget all the good we have experienced. It is so easy to forget to acknowledge all the lessons we learned, and all the ways we showed up when we could’ve more easily dropped the ball.

Some of the highlights for me were traveling to Mount Shasta for an amazing women’s retreat/pilgrimage and getting to go deeper into my studies on embodiment. Another was giving myself permission to celebrate my birthday all month, and getting to really take in how loved and supported I am and how many amazing people I share my life with.

More recently, I was thrilled to offer my first Women’s Sex and Sensuality salon in Miami. That was amazing for me and the women who showed up got a lot out of it. This was a big deal because one of my prayers this year (part of why I went to Mount Shasta) has been around wanting to be more fully living my purpose. And well, part of that has to do with bringing more awareness to our relationship to sexuality. But, I had a lot of fear of being visible around this topic. So I’m grateful and I’m proud of myself for facing those fears and sharing my work more openly with more women.

And then there’s gratitude for the hard stuff, the dark stuff, the stuff that in the moment makes us want to pull out hair out! Yes, there was some of that too. I almost got a full time job as a translator. I thought I was ready to stop with the freelancing life and get “real” and I tried my hardest and it just did not work out. And in retrospect, I am so grateful for that! I needed to get clear on what my true work is and I needed to face some practical realities around money. The process of trying to get that job (it was a government position so there were lots of hoops to jump through), brought up all this stuff that I’d been putting on the back-burner to be handled. Hallelujah!

I’m grateful for all of it. I don’t say that lightly. Some days I have to dig deep to touch that level of appreciation.

I wish you a window of time where you can drop in and digest your year. Love yourself up while you’re at it. Appreciate your efforts. Acknowledge all the good. Make space for what this coming year wants to bring you.